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In his own hand...

A facsimile copy of the original notebook of Rabindranath Tagore in which he translated Gitanjali into English has been printed by Sahitya Samsad, Kolkata. This was one of two that he made between 1910 and 1912, and the one that he gave William Rothenstein. Which Rothenstein gave to Yeats, and which Yeats, in some sense, gave to the world...

The notebook, like the Gitanjali itself, is a slender volume, most of the writing being on one side of the page. Most of it was, for a non-Bengali like me, unfamiliar, both in translation, and in the original... But there was a special thrill in seeing the hand of Tagore, trying different words, scratching out entire phrases... seeing the beginnings of his distinctive style of writing and drawing on the same page...

And also to see the evolution of his own translation.

For instance, the famous lines,

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

appear in the notebook, before more editing, before more polishing as

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held highWhere knowledge is freeWhere the world has not been frittered into fragments partitionedBy narrow domestic wallsWhere words come out from the depth of truthWhere sleepless striving stretches its strenuous arms towards perfectionWhere the clear stream of reason has not lost its wayInto the dreary desert sand of dead habi, andWhere the mind is led forward by theeInto everwidening thought and action- there waken up my country intothat heaven of freedom, my Father!

(The differences are marked in red, and the italicised word above was scratched out).

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